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On repeat: 'You can keep it' mantra

This time around, Obama needs the industry to make Obamacare work.

His restrained response over the past week shows just how much the dynamic between Obama and the insurance companies has shifted since the law passed — and how their fates have become intertwined. The health care law expands coverage to millions of Americans by sending them into the private insurance market armed with tax subsidies, forcing the president and his former nemeses into an uneasy partnership that’s only beginning to face strains.

“Their interests are aligned with our interests in terms of wanting to enroll targeted populations,” a senior White House official said Wednesday. “It is not that we will agree with everything now either, but I would say for some time now there has been a collaboration because of that mutual interest.”

The approach hasn’t sat well with some Democratic allies, who are publicly and privately urging the White House to ramp up its attacks on insurers, arguing that the the tactic shored up support as they struggled to push the bill through Congress. A group of Democratic strategists pressed senior administration officials during a conference call last week.

They’d like a repeat of 2009-10, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called insurers “the villains,” Obama blasted their willingness to “bend the truth or break it,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius accused them of banking excessive profits.

“When Obamacare got into trouble, we juxtaposed our message against the insurance companies, which are very unpopular,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has advised her 2014 clients, including Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, to go after insurers. “We should be messaging against the insurance companies this time as well. This is not good faith. If there is a snowstorm, the insurance companies are blaming it on Obamacare.”

The White House isn’t prepared to go there — not yet.

Senior administration officials said they’re working through a lot of problems with Obamacare and launching a frontal assault on the insurance industry isn’t going to fix them any quicker. And after all of the bad publicity from its own missteps, the White House doesn’t think a blame campaign will earn points with voters, the officials said.

But they also acknowledge that an industry that was the Democratic Party’s default bogeyman for decades is now its collaborator. The administration is spending billions of dollars to convince Americans to buy private health plans through the insurance marketplaces, so it serves no purpose to frighten consumers, the officials said.

That’s not to say it’s been smooth going since word of the policy cancellations began spreading over the last week.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett angered insurers when she posted on Twitter that it was a “fact” that “nothing in Obamacare forces people out of their health plans.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney has been critical of insurance companies during his daily briefings, calling the individual market an under-regulated “Wild West.” But he’s tried to strike a balance, casting insurers as engaged in bad practices before the new health care law brought them into line.

“Remember, before the Affordable Care Act, these bad apple insurers had free rein every single year to limit the care that you received or used minor pre-existing conditions to jack up your premiums or bill you into bankruptcy,” Obama said.

The nuance, if not lost on the industry, isn’t welcomed either.

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough has stepped up his direct outreach to the industry since the rocky launch Oct. 1, inviting insurance executives to the White House last week and attending a board meeting Tuesday of the industry’s lobbying arm, America’s Health Insurance Plans.